By Laurie Lears
The one where a girl gets embarrassed by her little brother, who's autistic, then loses him at the park and has to think the way he does to find him.
Julie wants to walk to the park with her big sister Tara and feed the ducks. That's the whole plan, and it's a good one. Then their mother says Ian is coming too. Ian is their little brother. Ian is autistic, and he doesn't do the walk the way Julie wants it done. He presses his cheek against the fire station wall. He smells things nobody else smells. He won't look where she points. Julie tells you just what she thinks of all this: that he looks silly, and that she wishes he'd stayed home. Then, at the park, she looks up and Ian is gone. The pond is right there. To find him she has to stop being annoyed and start thinking the way Ian thinks — where would he go, what would he want to touch and smell and hear. She works it out. He's at his favorite spot, safe. And she walks him home, letting him do the walk his way this time.
What's rare here is that Julie isn't a kind little girl learning to love her special brother. She's irritated. She's embarrassed to be seen with him. And the book lets her say so, right on the page, without a single grown-up showing up to correct her. Then it does something better than a lecture: it makes her lose him. The fear is what changes her, and what she learns isn't that she should be nicer. It's that Ian's way of moving through the world is a real way of moving through the world, one she can step inside and use. She finds him because she finally takes his mind seriously. Your child gets to feel the bad feeling, hold onto it, and come out the other side with something real instead of a scolding.